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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@Euclaise_
Cloudflare banned Switter from using their DDoS protection which is provided as part of their caching reverse proxy. Cloudflare's main service is the reverse proxy. They weren't hosting Switter, they were proxying to it, which they say doesn't count as hosting the content.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@Euclaise_
Cloudflare has been saying that their caching reverse proxy doesn't count as hosting sites but the overall consensus is that it counts as them being part of hosting the site. It's in their interest to portray it as not being hosting to reduce the responsibility people expect.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@Euclaise_
Their proxy is inherently caching based on Cache-Control / Expires headers. It tries to cache everything it can cache and then serves it from cache until it's supposed to revalidate. At that point it does conditional fetch that only actually fetches the content if it has changed.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
and
@Euclaise_
Always online is an optional feature for when the origin server goes down to continue serving stale content from the cache even though the expiry time has passed. Whether or not you use that, the caching is how their CDN works and is also essentially part of DDoS mitigation.
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Euclaise
@Euclaise_
Replying to
@DanielMicay
I think it doesn't count as hosting responsibility-wise without the Always Online thing, even if it actually is hosting technically. Legally is probably a different story too though
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@Euclaise_
Cloudflare being used that way stops people from figuring out the origin server hosting company which is part of the purpose of it. That means the only people you can ask to take down the content are Cloudflare and they just forward your requests with your identity to the site.
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